Bert Cardullo – författare

Over the last century, film actors from Charlie Chaplin and Lillian Gish to Meryl Streep and Jeff Daniels have spoken about the art and technique of playing to the camera. This fascinating anthology of their "insiders" observations will delight film lovers and aspiring film actors everywhere. The book has been edited by four leading film and theater historians, who have brought together selections from periodicals and books (some no longer in print), had some statements or conversations translated into English for the first time, and conducted new interviews with working actors. The book is divided into four parts—"The Silent Performance," "Finding a Voice," "European Acting," and "Hollywood Acting"—each of which is introduced by a brief commentary. This chronological and topical structure allows one actor to talk or argue with another as they offer astute—and often contradictory—opinions on a broad range of theoretical concerns. Among the issues they discuss are stage versus screen performance, the spiritual, emotional, and psychological underpinnings of the actor’s art, and the performer’s response to technical demands and other exigencies of filmmaking. The book, which also includes an insightful general introduction, film biographies of the actor-authors, and aptly chosen movie stills, is an essential resource—one that gives us, says Stanley Kauffmann, "the mapping of a new territory in art."

The essays collected here reflect the spectacular rise of Iranian cinema in recent years as well as the strong contributions of contemporary filmmakers from countries such as Belgium, Canada, China, Israel, Lebanon, Scotland, and Spain. But In Search of Cinema does not neglect the best recent films from major film-producing nations like the United States, France, and Italy and includes retrospective pieces on the careers of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen as well as several essays on the interrelationship between film form, or film genres, and drama and the novel, the two forms from which the cinema continues to draw a wealth of its material.

'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' offers close readings of genre films and acknowledged film classics in an attempt to explore both the aesthetics of genre and the definition of  'classic' - as well as the changing perception of so-called classic movies over time. Implicitly theoretical as much as it is unashamedly practical, this book is a model not only of film analysis, but also of the enlightened deployment of cultural studies in the service of cinema study.

'Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary' offers close readings of individual films intended to explain how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex and significant humanistic goals. It fills the middle ground between vague, simple plot summaries and theoretical pronouncements. As such, this book can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists.

Cinematic Illusions: Realism, Subjectivity, and the Avant-Garde" is a collection of twelve essays arranged around the primordial subject of realism and anti-realism (the experimental or non-representational) in film. The book treats not only the issue of realism versus anti-realism in the cinema, but also a number of subjects related to thisissue: sex; violence; the avant-garde; subjective response versus objective creation; and the New American Cinema versus Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. In sum, Cinematic Illusions treats the subject of illusion from the point of view of the cinema’s unsurpassed ability to create not only the illusion of reality, but also the reality of illusion on the silver screen.There are a number of books that treat this subject from an abstract or theoretical point of view. The virtue of "Cinematic Illusions" is that it treats the subject in actual filmic practice and in highly readable yet at the same time subtly expressive prose. In combination with the subjects listed above, moreover, this collection of essays treats such major film directors as Robert Bresson, Vittorio De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni--each of whom, in his own way, confronted the question of what constitutesrealism in the cinema.

The main purpose of The Movies on My Mind: Collected Criticism, 2002-2007 is to stake out territory for a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, the author offers close readings of individual films that go beyond simple plot summaries and vague impressions about acting (the province of the newspaper review), on the one hand, yet that pull up short of arid hermetic academic discourse (the province of the scholarly monograph), on the other hand. With elegance, clarity, and rigor, the author tries ever to demonstrate that the cinema means as well as shows, and his ultimate aim is to explain how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant humanistic goals. Thus, in addition to chronicling the vitality and richness of international film art, The Movies on My Mind aims to facilitate its understanding and appreciation. To wit, the reviews—or, better, chronicles—contained in The Movies on My Mind are acts of analysis and interpretation in the humanistic senses of those words; they are neither theoretical musings nor pedantic tracts. As such, this book can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists. These include, in the present collection, directors from such countries as France, England, the United States, Austria, Iran, Italy, Israel, Senegal, Afghanistan, Sweden, Finland, Columbia, (post-Soviet) Georgia, Japan, Argentina, South Korea, and Belgium. Contemporary films like The Passion of the Christ, The Pianist, The Hours, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are treated, as well as classics like Winter Light, La Strada, To Be or Not to Be, and How I Won the War. These review-essays themselves are supplemented by a bibliography of related criticism, directors’ filmographies, individual film credits, and a thoroughgoing index.There are other books on international, art-house cinema, but there are few that feature the international or global perspective of The Movies on My Mind. It is to other collections of film criticism that this book should be compared, however, since its real strength is critical. And there aren’t very many recent books that provide this kind of close analysis of contemporary movies together with a number of classics, and of some important directorial and critical careers as well. The Movies on My Mind thus offers a refreshing, readable alternative to both the facile, stargazing monographs that one can find in any chain bookstore and the arcane academic publications that deal with phenomenology, historiography, the politics of gender, race, and class, and the cognitive dissection of film style and technique.

This book is a collection of interviews with, and essays about, not so much the two non-Western filmmakers who introduced the cinema of their respective countries to the West—Akira Kurosawa (Japan) and Satyajit Ray (India), in the 1950s—but those who followed in their wake. From among them, I have chosen representative figures from such countries as Iran, China, Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, Kurdistan, and Afghanistan: Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Majid Majidi, Bahman Ghobadi, Siddiq Barmak, Samira Makhmalbaf, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hong Sang-soo, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Jun Ichikawa, Kim Ki-duk, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tsai Ming-liang.Waves from the East: New World Cinema, Asian Style documents an alternative to Western brands of cinema, even as these “foreign” directors in some instances integrate Western forms, styles, and genres into their own native traditions. As such, these artists could be said to represent a global filmmaking perspective that now, more than ever, this world—and the American nation in particular—can use. In the case of Iranian filmmakers like Panahi, Majidi, Kiarostami, and the Makhmalbafs, it remains to be seen how much artistic freedom they can retain in the increasingly militant theocracy of Iran. As for Chen Kaige, like Zhang Yimou, something also remains to be seen: the extent to which the Communist Chinese authorities have induced him to make “politics-free” entertainments as opposed to the kind of politically-conscious art films he used to make.Most of the interviews are accompanied by an essay by me on a representative film or films by the director in question. My intent in doing this, of course, is to “bounce” these writings off a director’s own words, to juxtapose what I think of his work against what he, the filmmaker, thinks of his work. The essayist and interviewees don’t always agree, but why must we? Moreover, I have tried to select interviews that are as artistically inclusive as possible. That is, the questions focus on practical matters related to filmmaking as much as they do on historical, aesthetic, and critical-theoretical issues raised by the films themselves. Richly illustrated with film stills, Waves from the East concludes with a bibliography, individual filmographies, and a comprehensive index

This is a collection of essays whose title more or less explains its contents. In Comparative Stages, the author attempts to chart some of the high points in the history of Western drama, from the Greeks to our contemporaries: ancient Athenian tragedy, Shakespearean historical comedy, French neoclassicism, and modern as well as avant-garde Euro-American drama. In addition, one can find here an examination of postwar Italian plays and a survey of German-language comedy from its origins to the twentieth century. Comparative Stages: Essays in the History of Euro-American Drama is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive history of the drama, Western or otherwise. But the book is intended to display a critical approach—historically contextual at the same time as it is intrinsically or organically analytical—that could lead to such a history, for there has not been anything even resembling one in quite some time. Let it be emphasized that this is a reference to a history of dramatic form—of the formal permutations the drama has undergone during its history and the philosophico-aesthetic as well as socio-political reasons for these stylistic-cum-structural permutations—not to a history of the theater or theatrical production (of which volumes there have been plenty). It is to be hoped that, with this collection of essays, the prefatory dialogue necessary to the undertaking of just such a history of Western, if not world, drama has at least begun.